1. Technical Field
The present invention relates generally to network based security systems, and more particularly relates to a web services security system that utilizes an XML security schema.
2. Related Art
One of the primary benefits of distributed networks such as the Internet is the ability to readily share information to many people across many different computing environments. However, a critical challenge faced by many organizations involves providing security within such a distributed environment. The challenge becomes even more pronounced for organizations that wish to implement complex security structures, where for instance very specific pieces of data must be made available to different sets of users across distributed and heterogeneous computing environments.
Multi-level, multi-user security in a web services environment that can carry multi-dimensional access tokens to row level data (data physically located at its lowest abstraction such as in a row on a relational database) has not been successfully addressed in highly secure, highly distributed computing environments. Most current “commercial of the shelf” (COTS) products act as gatekeepers for localized directory structures, and/or coarse user authentication, or are monolithic in their application of common COTS products to achieve multi-level multi-user security for more fine grain access and authentication control. They do not easily allow for data items to be secured at different levels and across heterogeneous security domains. Accordingly, providing very fine grain authorization access to highly secure data within and across disparate organizations that are utilizing web services has been an extremely difficult problem to solve.
The difficulty of solving this issue, the newness of the underlying technologies driving web services, and the evolution of commercial off the shelf security products, combined with the need in many circumstances to rapidly deploy a suitable security technique has given rise to a need for a more complete data security solution.